UK Patent News

The UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has commenced a public consultation and review of its trade mark services and fees. Its proposals follow The European Trade Mark Office's recent announcement that the official fees for filing and registering a Community Trade Mark have been cut by around 40% to €1000. The IPO's proposals include a new service that provides an examination report which details the results of the search for potentially conflicting trade marks. This service will be available for new applications who eFile their applications and pay 50% of the application fees. The IPO also proposes to offer a reduction of £30 from the basic £200 application fee when the application is made online and as well a discount for eFiling the IPO proposes a decrease the fee to file an opposition against a prospective trade mark from £200 to £100.

UK businesses can now apply to have patent applications fast-tracked through a “green channel” for innovations which benefit the environment. Sean Dennehey, the director of patents at the Intellectual Property Office (IPO), said that the initiative aims to reduce patent times for green technologies from up to three years to less than nine months. “There are critics of the patent system who say that it takes too long to get a patent, making it difficult to exploit important technologies quickly enough. We wanted something we could do quickly and now, because climate change won’t wait,” he said. In the past ten years the number of green technology patent applications has increased by 500 per cent. The IPO receives about 23,500 patent applications a week – about 150 to 200 of these are thought to be for green technologies. Visit http://www.ipo.gov.uk/